here is the deepest secret nobody knows
by dance-at-bougival
Summary: This family is a cage.


**A/N:** Spoilers through 3.11, heavy on Rebekah. First fic here, so feedback will be much appreciated!

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><p><strong>here is the deepest secret nobody knows<strong>

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><p><em>He is my brother. And I am immortal. Shall I spend an eternity alone instead?<em>

(REBEKAH, ORDINARY PEOPLE)

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><p>here is the deepest secret nobody knows<p>

_(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud_

_and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows_

_higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)_

_and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart_

_i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)_

(E. E. CUMMINGS, I CARRY YOUR HEART WITH ME)

* * *

><p>(The girl with the thousand year old face says, in all her childlike glory<em>, she is just a girl<em>. Her breath is soft, fanning like mist towards the boy in her bed, the brother-who-is-not-hers.

_She is just a girl, _she says_, who loves blindly and recklessly._

A breath, a sigh. _Even if it consumes her._

Rebekah is not there, you see. If she had been, her teeth would have been tearing into the doppelganger's soft throat already, spilling all that precious blood free. If there is one thing Rebekah had never been able to stomach, it's pity.)

* * *

><p><strong>ACT I : THE AGE OF INNOCENCE<strong>

The first day is the worst.

The sun bleeds, red and raw over the horizons, throwing a hazy glow over the slaughtered heaps of human flesh, readying to rot. Rebekah does not cry, does not scream. She does not say a word, merely lets the knot in her throat grow until it becomes a dull, throbbing pain in the very fibres of her flesh.

If she screams now, she will never stop.

"We have to go," Elijah says, quiet, soft, next to her. "Rebekah, we have to go, now. We have to be gone before Father thinks of us. Call for Nik. We must leave."

"No." She says, and her voice is faint. "We have to bury Mother. We can't go until we bury her."

"Rebekah," Elijah says, and his voice is choked too, his voice is stretched, tight, thin across a single chord of carefully maintained control. "We have to go before he comes back for us. He's gone mad, Rebekah. We can't sit here and wait for him. We have to go."

"Not until Nik comes back with Mother," Not even a whisper, this. How a girl grows into a woman. "Not until we bury Mother."

They do not bury their mother until the sun rises fully, until Nik emerges from the rubble of their house with their mother's grey and dirty corpse cradled in his arms, as easily, as lightly as if she is a doll. He lays her at Rebekah's feet.

_I am not weak,_ she thinks, and runs her fingers through her mother's long golden hair, speckled with dust, twists it over and under, threads of gold and light and _sun. _She thinks, _I must be strong_, and says nothing as she helps her brothers dig a hole into the thick, wet ground, until her fingers are dark with mud, until her face runs wet with tears and Nik has his arms around her, whispering reassurances she does not hear.

_Shhh_, he murmurs, _Bekah, don't cry, Bekah, Bekah_—

He says her name like a prayer, his fingers rubbing against her hair like he is holding a rosary, like he is grasping at the feet of a saint.

She stands up tall, then, says, _I'm fine_, and throws a handful of dirt over her mother's corpse.

Later, she says, _I will never betray you._

Later, she says, _we must stick together as one._

Later, she says, _always and forever._

Her brothers' fingers lace through hers and they are all of them promises_. I will never leave you_, she thinks. _Never, never, never_, the word pounding in her head like a drum.

She makes him a promise, makes her brother a promise—_no, no, not Elijah, never Elijah_—says, _always and forever_, and signs away her life.

* * *

><p>(They find Charlotte Petrova's body beneath the rubbles of a hut, and both of them watch, watch for a single, solemn moment as Elijah bends over her and brushes a finger, light as April rain, over the ugly gash in her throat. Elijah's mouth is cut tight, tucked into the shadow, and Nik turns his head away, throat working. None of them say a word.<p>

Elijah stands up, and says, "Across the sea, then. Back to Europe.")

* * *

><p>For the longest time, the silences between them are cut with words unspoken, with voiceless litanies.<p>

They make their way, slowly, across the oceans back towards Europe, towards the home her brothers had known before, encounters a thousand different lands, encounters a thousand different peoples, and Rebekah realizes for the first time in her short life how vast the world really is, how crippling it would be to wander this world alone, a single speck of dust in the grand scale of life.

They arrive back in Romania, a strange land Rebekah had never known, find themselves a little cottage in a dark patch of wood, and Rebekah takes to hiding in the shadows, takes to lurking behind the girls her age, listening to their voices and imagining herself a part of this life.

Rebekah knows, you see. She knows the meaning of what she is. She will never marry a handsome young boy chosen by her father. She will never have healthy sons to carry on his estate. She will never grow old surrounded by her children. No. Her lot is life in its direst, cruellest sense. Her lot is blood and slaughter and shadows and death. Her lot is immortality.

Her blood shall freeze up in her veins one day, she thinks on quiet nights. Her blood shall freeze and stop and lie, cold and still in her veins, and cease to reach and warm her heart, and over time this face she wears will hang over her like a mask, like a piece of dead flesh, hiding what truly lies beneath.

_But I will have what matters. I will have my brother and my other half._

"Do you wish to join them?" Nik asks her one afternoon as she lounges above two girls in an old oak, watching the two of them dangle their feet in the lake.

Her brother lies a branch adjacent to hers, lazy and negligent, like a lounging cat. He is watching the two girls as well, but there is a different kind of hunger in his eyes.

He had been a man, Rebekah remembers suddenly. He had been a man in the village, and there had been loose tongues, as there had always been, about his comings and goings. Unbidden, she feels a sudden flash of jealousy, as bright and hot as flames. She turns her eyes, hurriedly, back to the girls.

"Does it matter?" She says. "I'm a monster. It'll never happen."

A long silence, and then he says, softly, "Bekah."

Mouths the word like a chant, like the Latin the priest in the church recites in his dry tones, but in Nik's mouth the words take on a different kind of sound, curls around his tongue until every syllable becomes a caress, every cadence a breath. Rebekah's mouth tucks into her cheek tight, and she says nothing.

"Bekah," he says. "Look at me."

She doesn't. One of the girls—_Anica, that's her name_—laughs at something the other girl says and tosses her head back to expose her long column of throat. Nik doesn't so much as blink.

"_Bekah_," he says, exasperated. "Bekah, _look at me_."

She does not cry, she does not say a word, merely turns her head to her brother in the most disdainful way possible.

"You are worth a thousand of those girls," he tells her. "We are the first of a new species, don't you understand?"

"We are the first of the abominations, you mean." She snaps back, and her eyes burn with unshed tears, hushed tears, tears that must not fall. _I am strong, I am strong, I am strong._ "We shouldn't be alive. We're monsters, Nik. Creatures of the devil."

"No," he says, leans towards her. "No, Bekah. We are not demons, we are not devils. We're angels. We're gods. We are God's creatures, if anything. You think those—" he throws a hand at the girls. "You think those _bags of meat_ are created in His image? You think those are anything except food or playthings? _No_, Bekah. _We_ are. We are the ones created in God's image; we are the rulers of this land. The meek shall _not_ inherit the earth. We will."

She does not realize she is holding a breath until he reaches forward, pushes a strand of gold behind her ear. "Go," Nik smiles. "Go make friends, Bekah."

"I—"

He jerks his head towards the girls. "Play nice with the humans, sister."

She smiles wide, from ear to ear, and jumps from the tree, landing on her feet with the grace of a cat.

* * *

><p>Anica has a laugh like a bird taking flight, soaring above and beyond everything Rebekah has ever known.<p>

She braids Rebekah's hair, and weaves into the strands of gold the small flowers she finds at the banks of the river, and the base of trees. She tells wicked jokes about the wanton women at the edges of the village, whose huts are always loud with laughs and sighs deep into the night. Rebekah smiles wide and returns to the house with a light in her eyes, learns to courtesy and demure.

"How handsome your brothers are," Anica says one afternoon, when she glimpses Nik and Elijah, tilts her head and smiles.

Rebekah murmurs something she does not remember, but for the first time, her eyes cut upwards, and she does not look quite a girl anymore.

* * *

><p>Rebekah takes to bringing Anica around to their cottage.<p>

"Haven't your brothers wives of their own?" The girl asks one afternoon, the two of them watching Elijah and Nik spar a little distance away, their laughs carrying back towards the cottage.

Rebekah pauses, her fingers lying still around the daisies she is weaving into a crown. The thought had never occurred to her, in truth, and she trains her eyes on her brothers, one dark, one as wrought out of gold as herself. As if sensing her gaze, Nik looks up over his sword, and grins at her.

"No." Rebekah says, and her voice is tighter, infinitesimally tighter. "No. Nik said he would never leave me. Neither would Elijah. Always and forever, you see."

"Of course not forever," Anica rolls her eyes. Rebekah feels something coil at the pit of her stomach, something dark and brutal and cold as night. She pushes it down, thinks, _I am strong, I am strong, I am strong. I am not a monster_. "They have to marry at some point. Marry and have sons and—"

Rebekah's fingers are tight around her daisies, the white petals crushed beneath her iron grip.

Anica's eyes widen. "I should marry Nik!"

Rebekah's knuckles are white, the daisies thin and shredded between her fingers. "What?"

"Think of it, Rebekah!" Anica says, her dark eyes wide and bright. _Eyes like Charlotte Petrova's_, she thinks. "I shall marry Nik, or Elijah—it matters not—and we shall be together, always. We shall be sisters, Rebekah! I shall have babies and you shall be an aunt, and a sister to me!"

_I am already a sister_, Rebekah thinks. There are red crescents in the palm of her hand. She can feel them, feel her skin healing already. For a second, she wants to bleed, wants her palms to run red, wants to hit Anica so hard across the face that the girl's lips shall be stained as red as her palm.

Anica turns her eyes back to Rebekah's brothers. "Nik, I think." She says thoughtfully. "Elijah is handsome, but he shall bore me terribly. He looks quite the man of cloth. Perhaps that is why he is not married."

"My brothers don't want to be married." Rebekah says. "They both vowed not to take wives, so they can be with me for always. Always and forever."

Anica turns those dark eyes on her. "Oh, Rebekah," she says, in the voice of an adult talking to a precocious, stubborn child. "All men want to be married. At least, they want the pleasures of the marital bed. They were just coddling you."

For a second, Rebekah sees red. Sees blood hazing the edges of her eyes, feels the veins under her skin protrude. Rebekah opens her moth wide, letting her fangs press into her lip, watches the fear in Anica's eyes, watches the scream constrict in her throat. She lunges.

She rips into the girl's throat, and pulls away with a chunk of flesh between her teeth, blood running down her chin and throat into the cotton of her new dress.

_They shall not leave me_, Rebekah thinks. _Always and forever, we said._ _Always and forever and you, mortal, you are nothing, a speck of dust, you shall not take them away from me, no, you shall not—_

As if from a great distance away, she hears her name, hears Elijah's startled shout and Nik's quick steps.

"Bekah!" Nik shouts.

Her brothers are by her in an instant, Nik's hands around her face, his fingers against the veins protruding through her skin, while Elijah cradles Anica's head in his lap. _There you go, girl,_ Rebekah thinks, vicious. _There's the attention you wanted. That's the only part of my brothers you shall have._

"Rebekah," Elijah asks softly, his fingers against the girl's throat. "Rebekah, what have you done?"

She opens her mouth, and no words come out. She has no excuses, no reasons. The only thing she has is that dark, ugly knob of unknowns twisting in her heart.

"It doesn't matter," Nik says. "She's just a girl. Just a human. Leave her, Elijah."

"She's not dead yet." Elijah says lightly, and brushes Anica's thick waves back from her face. He pauses.

_He sees what I saw,_ Rebekah thinks. _He thinks she looks too much like a Petrova to die. _

Even now, the ghost of Charlotte hangs about her brother, refuses to let him go. Elijah's teeth press lightly against his lips, and suddenly, in a flash of movement, he brings his wrist up to his mouth and bites.

Thick, dark blood, not as red and not as alive as their food, runs down his arm and he brings it to Anica's mouth, squeezes her nose to make her swallow.

"Elijah." Nik says. "Elijah. What have _you_ done?"

"It—" Her brother's face is white. "It should heal her, should it not? If—if we heal quickly, then surely—"

The girl stops breathing.

* * *

><p>And breathes again, hours later.<p>

Wakes dirty and afraid and thirsty at Rebekah's feet.

"What—" the girl starts, voice hoarse. "What is happening? Where am I?"

The wood is smooth and hard beneath Rebekah's fingers. Her hands twist around it easily, and it disturbs her, just a little, how effortlessly the weapon folds against her skin. "Anica," she steps forward, and the girl stands, falls in her bid to get away. "Anica."

(Nik's hands cup her face and his voice is gentle, his voice is light. She casts her eyes down, and wishes, wishes that for a second that she can remember him as he was, that he can see, see like Anica, see what a monster she had become, see the veins around her eyes and find no reasons to commend her for them and be disgusted, be afraid, be anything other than consumed in this mask of the devotee he shrouds himself—

She is no longer a girl_. See, just see_. That is all she wishes.

"Bekah," Nik says, brushes a long strand of gold behind her ear, whispers to her like a dying lover. "Bekah, you have to do this. You must."

She does not look at him, dares not to. She cannot imagine, cannot comprehend how he can still talk to her thus when what she is about to do is _this_.

"Bekah," Nik says. "No loose ends.")

She is faster than the girl. That is a given.

She is stronger than the girl. That is a given.

She is no longer human, like the girl. That had been seen to.

She drives the stake through the girl's chest, easy as breathing, easy as life, pushes it through the dip at the base of her stomach, twists up so that it pierces her heart beneath the delicate, breakable bones. Rebekah finally takes a breath just as the girl takes her last.

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><p>Later, Nik says, "well done, sister."<p>

* * *

><p>Rebekah takes to slaughter in the human way.<p>

She shorns her hair, bounds her breasts and dons armour. She finds herself fighting alongside honest men, good men—_men, that is the important part_, she thinks, _men, and not monsters_—when she lands on the shores of England.

It's almost like a prayer, she thinks, as if the Almighty himself had answered her prayer.

No pain. No guilt. Nothing.

Nik is in Granada, last she heard. Bathing his hands in blood and war and carnage, and Elijah somewhere in the Far East. _Ten years,_ her brother has said. _Ten years and I shall see you again, Bekah, bright and gold and crimson._

(This is the truth he does not tell her:

He has naught to do with the massacre. Instead he braves wind and rain and water to return to their home, tracks down with eyes and nose and words the location of the witch Ayanna. Finds the woman, old now, a wrinkled, shrivelled thing, curled up beside a fire.

"Witch," he says, and steps towards her, lets his face fall from the shadows into the light, lets the fire limn his features in gold.

The old woman closes her eyes, smiles a sad smile and says, "Niklaus."

He has not aged a day. Has not aged a day in forty years, and now he stands over her, stands tall and leonine and looming. "The truth. I want the truth. I want the solution."

"How is your sister?" The witch asks. "She was always my favourite."

Nik smiles. "I want the solution."

The witch does not reply.

"My mother was a witch." He says. "You are a witch. You must have studied her curse. Now tell me how to break it."

"Do you really believe that I would rebel against Nature itself and assist you in breaking a curse that keeps the human race safe?" The witch asks. "Niklaus. Be serious."

"Oh, I am." He says. "I am very serious."

He gestures, and from beyond the door a girl, no older than a child, walks dully in, her eyes blank and dark.

"Your grandchild, I believe." Nik says.)

* * *

><p>The next time he sees his siblings, he has dipped his hands in blood and ink, and he is bright, he is gold, he is crimson.<p>

"I've found out how to lift the curse." He says, and stares them both dead in the eyes.

* * *

><p><strong>ACT II : THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT<strong>

For her services in the Conquest, Rebekah is granted a lordship.

_Bravery_, they say. _Bravery and courage, even in the face of Death._

That, she laughs at. Laughs and thinks, _I _am_ Death._

"Lord Niklaus," the Conqueror says, and she rises, the blood still drying on her fingertips.

Let none say she does not earn her power, does not conquer it when she realizes she has none. Let none say that hers is the power of family, of entitlement, because _this_—this is hers. This is Rebekah's. Not her father's, not her mother's, and not her brothers'. She has dipped her hands in blood for this, has let death roar in her veins and burn through what is left of her heart for this, and _this_—this is hers.

(She exists in a cage, you see. And the caged need something to call their own.)

* * *

><p>Their younger brother finds them, more than a hundred years after he left, and Nik smiles kindly, murmurs reassuring words, and drives a dagger through his heart.<p>

Rebekah's words choke on a strangled cry, and she falls forwards—_still such a girl, such a little girl_—inches towards the brother she does not quite remember fully, whose face she does not quite comprehend.

"He betrayed us, Bekah." Klaus says, and Elijah says nothing, stands by, averts his eyes. "He left us. We cannot tolerate any hint of treachery. Our loyalty to each other must be absolute."

"He didn't betray you." She whispers. "He just—"

"Left." Klaus's voice leaves no room for dissent. "That's betrayal, Bekah. That's betrayal in its purest sense."

"It's freedom." She says. "He wanted freedom, from us. From you. He wanted a choice."

He looks at her through heavy lashes, and does not say a word, wills her to take it further, if she dares.

She does not. What she fears isn't the same fate. What she fears is that if she says it, if she gives voice to the words in her mouth, then there will be no way back. What is said cannot be unsaid, and the two of them, they live in a perpetual cycle of unspoken thoughts.

_And what would you do,_ _dear brother_, she thinks, _when my loyalties do not prove absolute?_

* * *

><p>The first doppelganger is born into a brothel in Calais, doe eyes dark and bright and a mouth that twists easily into the smile of a whore. She is her mother's daughter.<p>

It is a shock, the first time Rebekah sees her, pale and bloody in a soldier's barracks, beaten to death. She bends, brushes her hair away from her forehead and sees, for the first time in over two hundred years, the face of a girl dead and rotting in the ground.

Klaus does not speak for a month afterwards.

* * *

><p>She thinks, on some nights, that he shall surely leave her.<p>

She does not voice it. She gives the thought no sound, merely lets it fester in her mind, lets it blur her vision every time her brother smiles at her, calls her _Bekah_ in that reverent tone, and it is always on the edge of her tongue, aching to escape, but she says nothing. If she voices it, it becomes true. If she lets it out of her, lets it out of the hole it is burning inside her then it shall be real, and he will create his hybrids and one day he shall cease to call her _Bekah_ and instead look at her like she is nothing, like she is not there. She must not let it escape.

That is her deepest fear. She has given up everything she might have had for him. She has allowed herself to rot from within, as surely as if she is dead, crafted herself a cage of words and bonds and blood.

This is why, she supposes, when the young knight in her brother's retinue smiles at her, she smiles back.

He is tall and golden and grins like a boy, with something almost like purity in his eyes. She feels her insides flutter when he bows low over her hand, murmurs some trite recycled courtesy, and cannot help when the pulse in her wrist quickens.

"Like the sun," he compliments her one night, at one of the events her brother likes to organize. He winks at her, and it is clear that even he finds the words in his mouth hackneyed and stale. "The moon, perhaps, if you like that better."

She smiles up, smiles prettily for her white knight, the way she hasn't smiled in decades. "You must say that to every lady, Sir Francois. You should not seek to trick me thus. I am but a girl."

"Only the ladies who are worthy of the sun and moon," he replies, smooth and quick and Rebekah should be wary, she should be careful, she should think, _one death, simply one and it shall be Anica all over again_—but instead she smiles back and steps forwards, watches his smile twitch, watches the pulse in his throat quicken, and her eyes darken.

When she speaks again, her voice is low, hoarse. "And am I a lady to you, Sir?"

She watches him swallow hard. "A queen," he says finally. "The Queen of Love and Beauty."

There is a tourney the next day, and she sits by her brother's side, watches the boy ride with her colours around his arm.

_What a strange turn of events,_ Rebekah thinks. She has a champion now, never mind that the boy has no idea what it means to swing one's sword with the intent to kill. He looks at her like she is a lady, and she acts the role for him, adds the word to her long repertoire of characters—_killer, monster, vampire, sister_—and lets it rub against her skin, lets it chafe at her, as sure as if it is a physical thing.

When he unseats his challenger, her white knight wheels his horse over to the grand stand, places a wreath of flowers in her lap, and grins like a boy. "For the Queen."

Beside her, her brother's face is blank, white and clenched, fingers digging into the arms of his chair.

She smiles graciously, fakes a valiant blush for her champion, and her brother is silent, her brother says nothing, but for the first time he looks at her truly, and she thinks—_ah, there you go._

It has taken three hundred years, but he sees the monster now. The girl is gone.

* * *

><p>She takes her champion to bed that night, lets her sighs mix through the strands of his gold hair, and bites hard. She bites until he cries out, until her teeth hit something very red, very thick and very vital beneath his skin. She kisses him with his blood on her lips, and sets him to sleep with some of hers.<p>

Outside, under the moon, her brother waits for her.

His face is tight, a muscle jumping beneath the fall of his gold hair, just above the square cut of his jaw. His fingers tap, quick and insistent on the goblet of wine in his hands, and Rebekah folds herself, long and sinuous, against the wall, next to him.

How perfect her copy had been. Her white knight lacks the steely quality of her brother's dark eyes, so incongruous against the rest of him, lacks that leonine quality in the cut of bone and the curve of cheek, but silently, Rebekah watches her brother's mouth arch and twist and curl into the dark, and forgets, for a split second, that she has not kissed it.

He does not call her Bekah, does not speak as though he is about to pray.

(That is her tragedy, you see. They are both of them about to leave, but she leaves first, and she leaves last, just so he cannot do the same to her.)

"Do you wish to keep him?" He asks instead, his voice very low, very calm.

She reaches for the goblet in his hands, and presses her lips to where his had been. She drinks deeply, lets the sour bite of the wine merge with the velvet of her knight's blood on her tongue. She does not lie.

"Yes."

He closes his eyes, and bows his head, as if he is bearing a great weight. Rebekah swallows hard, and turns her head. Bites her lips so that they almost break skin.

"I suppose this was going happen sooner or later." He says, voice low and smooth and dangerous, just the tiniest hesitation before every word, as if he is working very hard not to give into his nature, to purr and not snarl. "You are still a girl, after all. Foolish infatuations are… bound to happen, I suppose."

There it is again. That word, even when he no longer believes it. The denigration to _girl_.

"Why are you doing this?" He asks, but that is not the question. The question is _why are you leaving me?_ The sentiment is _you promised me forever_. "Have I not loved you enough?"

She fixes him with a stare, lifts her chin, and her voice does not shake, her voice does not quiver. She does not hesitate. "The love of a brother."

He stares at her for a long time, mouth twisting, as if he means to yell. And then he turns away.

"Fine." He says. "Have him. Have your pet. Take him away, far from here. Mother to your heart's content, and find me the next doppelganger."

She looks away. "I shall not see you for a time, then."

He stands up, straightens the cambric shirt she had stitched for him. "Do not come back until you find her. I don't care how long it takes. You made your choice, and now you have to stick with it."

She smiles, an ugly, twisted thing. "I never made a choice. I don't make choices, Nik."

He looks at her then, and his eyes are blank, and he looks at her as if she is nothing, as if she is not there. She listens to his steps until they fade into the night.

* * *

><p>She goes back inside when the sun is beginning to rise, and snaps her knight's neck.<p>

* * *

><p>She ventures south first, with her knight, to the caves and deserts of Africa, traces with her fingers her brother's carvings in deserts and on long-abandoned city walls, eroded by sands and time.<p>

_How easy it is_, she thinks, _to toy with the future._

She learns different tongues, twists the words in and around in her mouth until they are perfect. She visits temples and castles, sees the world, for the first time, without her brother, only a proxy of him by her side. She indulges in every kind of delight, drinks and kills and laughs in equal measure, teaches her pet how to slaughter without staining his shirt, teaches him to hide his tracks, to bend others quietly and seamlessly to his will, and together, they lap at blood the way a cat laps at milk, and kiss each other with their victims' blood still on their lips.

(And she does not notice, does not allow herself to notice, that her knight never bites as hard or slaughters as much as she would like, that blood does not enhance the shine in his hair but rather dims it, that his eyes are too blue for her liking, too light and too pure, even after all these years, that she prefers something darker, as if she is staring into the eyes of hell—

She says nothing, but barely a decade into the exile she so sought, she begins to ache.)

She plants her spies in every village, every castle, every land. Stewards and chamberlains and dukes and lords and half the serfs in every village in Europe, searching for a single face, for a single name. Their lives are hers, vampires and humans alike. They report to her, pay her penance, worship her as if she is a goddess, and her name becomes a blessing and a curse, long before the same happens to her brothers.

* * *

><p>She is in Greece when she hears word of her brother, the first time in fifty years.<p>

A village in Romania, the young vampire says, head bowed. Slaughtered, men and women and children alike, and amongst the piles of bodies, a single coffin is wheeled back to England, inside—another brother stuck with a silver dagger.

She brushes her hands down the front of her elaborate dress, and tilts her head, enjoying the fall of thick gold curls against the nape of her neck. _My loyalties are absolute_. "And?"

"He has the moonstone." The boy says. "Your brother Kol had it all along."

She smiles, looks down at her demure, folded hands. "And Elijah?"

"Still by his side. As dutiful as ever. They are establishing their own network of spies—"

"Tell my brother I have that covered." She says. "I have eyes and ears throughout Europe, the Middle East and the Orient. It will take him years to set up a system like mine. Tell him not to bother."

The young boy shakes his hands. "Not of vampires. Or humans. Werewolves."

She lifts her eyebrows.

"The Curse of the Sun and the Moon, Klaus calls it." he says. "He has created a tale, a curse. If a werewolf breaks it, he says, it shall end their slavery to the moon, and for a vampire, the sun. He means to have two warring species looking for a single doppelganger. He wanted me to tell you, 'you're welcome'. Also, he told me to deliver this." The boy hands her a piece of folded parchment.

She lifts it from his hand with delicate fingers, strokes its unbroken seal.

_Kill him_, it reads inside, in Klaus's stark letters with his signature flicks. _No loose ends, Bekah._

It is an order, not a request. She pours the boy another glass of the finest wine, and compels him to take off his ring.

* * *

><p>(Finally, then, finally, a name, a face—<p>

_Katerina_.)

* * *

><p><strong>ACT III : THE RESTORATION<strong>

She remembers Bulgarian well enough, though the past two decades of her life had been dedicated more to Italian and Latin than anything, but now she plays the coquette well enough, the words easy in her mouth.

It is just a role, you see. And Rebekah is a queen of facades.

"He loves you!" She insists with all the certainty of a girl long dead. "You can tell, Kat. He looks at you as if you are a queen."

Katerina Petrova rolls her eyes, smiles wickedly. "Well, he certainly kisses me like I am one."

Rebekah gasps, slipping easily into the body of the jealous friend. Of course the village boy with the foolish grin kisses like a Lancelot. Rebekah had seen to that.

"And you let him?" She inches forward. "Tell me, Kat. Tell me all of it."

It is easy, grooming the girl with the long dead face like a pig for the slaughter, and she plays them all, like puppets on their lines, dangles them forwards and backwards at her own pleasure, making sure everything is just so before she—

"Will you marry him?" Rebekah asks in the wistful voice of the romantic.

Katerina smiles. "Father shall object, of course, but once he finds out—"

"Finds out what?" Rebekah inches forward. "Has he proposed? Oh, Kat, tell, tell—"

Katerina Petrova smiles, a smile like a secret, a smile like a thing to be worshipped by millions. "I am with child."

—_strikes_.

* * *

><p>(Truth be told, the boy had wanted to marry his Katerina, and if he had pushed for it, if he had pushed for it the way he planned to, Katerina would be happily married by now, with a bouncing little girl.<p>

Rebekah is a vampire. She is a monster and a killer and more than anything she is a destroyer of worlds.

She tears it all apart with a few well-chosen words, looks the boy in the eyes and tells him to abandon the doppelganger, looks Katerina's father in the eye and plants an idea, of a duke in England, a land far away from his daughter's shame, a monumentally better life for his soiled darling.)

It isn't a stake through the heart, but Rebekah sends Katerina to her death all the same.

* * *

><p>She sends her brother a message when the doppelganger sets off for England, to be carried over land and water.<p>

_Your move._

* * *

><p>Rebekah celebrates her five hundredth name-day alone, a single, solitary figure standing in a clearing, now eroded by nature and time, feet bare against the cold ground, at the same spot where half a millennia ago she had lived with her family, had laughed, had smiled without intent, had lived in the fullest sense of the word.<p>

She leaves a white flower, a water-lily, on the ground, in the exact centre of the clearing, and lets herself cry, just this once.

_I am strong, I am strong, I am strong._

"Here lies Rebekah," she says out loud. "Here lies Niklaus."

_Rest in peace._

* * *

><p>The Marrano sits, lavish, in the Holy Throne of Saint Peter's, and Rebekah wears a gown of gilded silk, sitting demurely in the terrace of Klaus's new palazzo. She leans back and her hair, in the thick heavy curls of the Roman fashion, spills over the back of the chair. The clamour of the city floats through to her, elevated on a hill that had once housed emperors.<p>

She speaks before her brother even enters the room. "You've lost her, then."

"Not for long, sweet sister, but thank you for your concern." He stops, stares at her for one moment before letting his eyes drop, sweep over the landscape of the city. "You're back, then."

She rakes her eyes over the length of him, like a hungry, wanton thing.

He smiles easily now, and it seems that now he is always smiling, a smile that twists just as easily into a snarl. There is a new kind of cruelty etched into the lines of his face, and she had studied, days past, the way his servants cower and bow around him, even when he laughs and takes everything in good cheer.

She has not seen him for nigh on a hundred years, and it is only now that he ceases to smile.

"Hmm," she says. "Bulgaria was beginning to bore, so I ventured back, just in time for your return." She sits up, opens her heavy lidded eyes and smiles at her brother, a smile as bright and hard as the ruby around her throat. It winks, red as a knife wound. "Quite a clamour you made, coming to Rome. Nothing gets these Colonnas going like a nice, young, marriageable duke. Where's Elijah, Nik?"

He smells of musk and sweat and the distinct, thick scent of his Barbary. Rebekah drums her fingers, idly, on her lap, above the material of her dress, and lets the scent of him curl around her, like perfume, like chains. Beneath it all, there is the raw velvet of blood.

"Concluding a little business with dear Katerina." He shrugs. "She runs, her family dies. Ways of the world, really."

She does not reply for a beat, a split second in which his eyes meets hers, and holds. "I see."

His hands clench into fists, and he looks down at his boots. "Bekah—"

"I heard he was infatuated with her." Rebekah says. "Petrovas… Petrovas are a weak spot of Elijah's."

"I cured him of it," Klaus replies. "I reminded him that we are not weak."

She looks away from him, smiles and makes a contemplative noise. Thinks, _I am strong, I am strong, I am strong. _Thinks, _I am not weak._

He does not move to stop her when she glides past him, her fingers barely skimming against the fabric of his sleeve.

"I've missed you." He says instead.

* * *

><p>They fall into their old patterns, of wants and deaths and blood and Rebekah keeps no more secrets from her brother. Elijah stays away, does Klaus's bidding as always, but they do not see him except for official visits.<p>

Rebekah has not the heart to leave as she had done before, has not the heart to leave him, not now, not again. Instead she fills the hole Elijah leaves behind, follows her brother though the war-torn states of Italy as Il Valentino rips it apart. She follows him through cities and forests and villages and farms and deserts and seas, and she begins to recognize the places where she had tread years ago, decades, centuries ago—forests razed for the building of castles and fortresses and towns, rivers turned into irrigation, and it is as if she is looking into the past, as if the very air is humming with her deaths.

"I will be stuck with this curse my whole life." Klaus says one night, years after she comes back, his lips bloody and red, a girl's corpse flung carelessly to one side. "I will be stuck, Bekah. My whole life. I will be an abomination twice over."

She does not comfort him, does not soothe him with false words or lies. Instead she reaches forward, fingers light against the unshaven surface of his jaw, and touches her forehead very lightly to his. "And I will be with you, through it all, Nik. I am cursed too."

He closes his eyes, breathes very slowly through his nose, and threads his fingers into her hair, gold, same as his.

* * *

><p><em>I love you.<em>

This they do not say. Those are three words used too often and used too soon. For them, only one word matters, and they have promised it to each other, over and over, and that word, too, is corrupt, broken, and fraying.

* * *

><p>They track Katerina to the ends of the world and back.<p>

They burn down entire villages, slaughter entire populations, and blood falls in a rain that rains for days whenever they wish, whenever Katerina runs just a few steps out of their grasp. Rebekah no longer looks upon a dark-haired girl and sees someone six hundred years dead, no longer feels her heart jump at the sight of dark curls on a street corner, no longer feels anything except a deep inextricable pull towards her brother. She only feels when he does, only allows herself to laugh when he does, and slowly, slowly, piece by piece, she rips herself apart at the seams and crafts herself out of blood, out of flesh, out of death, out of him. She remakes herself in his image.

He is the only one she has left, after all. And she has learnt the hard way that he cannot be replaced.

She does not want to be alone.

Where they walk, there are always corpses strewn alongside, beautiful women for him and handsome young men for her, all of them as golden as their predators. They leave their mark on their homeland, the same as they had centuries ago, and for years, the starved peasants of the land tell hushed tales of vengeful, heathen gods. It is not far from the truth. They are immortal, after all, and all powerful. Rebekah wages that they are the closest the peasants would come to paradise.

Images of them begin to arise, a pair of golden, blood-soaked beasts—a blood countess in Hungary, a vampire count in Romania. They are both of them bound together, together, always.

"Artemis and Apollo," he says one day, "The immortal, golden twins. The god of the sun and the goddess of the moon. Her arrows bring swift death, and his, a slow, agonizing, lethal pain."

She smiles at him. "I see your delusions of grandeur have reached new heights."

"Absolute loyalty within the family," he says. "Total, absolute loyalty, without a shadow of doubt. When the Theban queen, Niobe, insulted their mother, Artemis and Apollo slew all of her fourteen children, but spared the queen so that she can suffer for all eternity. They say that she turned into stone in her grief, but continued to weep, from which the River Achelous was formed. _That_—_that_ is loyalty, Bekah."

She has learnt to read him as easily as an open book, and now she stops, looks him in the eyes. "What is it, Nik?"

He looks at her through heavy lashes, says, "He killed our mother. He turned us into abominations. He destroyed our family. And now he's after us."

They begin to run.

* * *

><p><strong>ACT IV : THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS<strong>

They run through the length of Europe, always one step ahead but not always as siblings.

In London he is a wealthy American banker and she plays the role of demure wife, floating white cotton stitched into a Josephine gown as they ride through Hyde Park, all the society darlings hanging onto her every word, all the dapper gentlemen at his beck and call.

In Paris she is a socialite and he is her betrothed, and she goes through every shade of pastel while they row on the Seine. She meets an artist on the shore, some whelp named Renoir something or another, and her brother voices the thought, on quiet afternoons, of chopping off the boy's dainty white fingers, wonders aloud and comes to the conclusion that even artists must bleed blood, and not paint or dreams. She keeps him for a few months, discards him when he becomes bothersome, and leaves behind another boy haunted by her face.

In Vienna she is a rich widow, and he is her servant, dragged along in tow. He fills her champagne flute and whispers to her, Latin verses in velvet opera boxes, the gold tassels same glint as their hair. He whispers Norma's lines to her, Lucretia Borgia's, Anna Bolenna's, lips just air behind the curl of her hair, and she laughs at his inflections. They both pretend they do not remember what it is like to sing instead of snarl.

All these years and she is still by his side. All these years and she is still his.

She has pledged him her life, after all, she has killed and slaughtered and massacred and tore herself open for him. She has held his hand through it all, and he has clutched at her hard enough to bruise. In sickness, in health, for richer or poorer, till death do they part.

* * *

><p>(Much of the late nineteenth century is spent in New York, under different names and different guises. This is a city that forgets quickly, a city of stars burning quickly and dying with even greater speed. Elijah makes an art of being forgettable.<p>

It is 1899, and the three of them glide through high society, the new darlings of the gilded age, posing as the children of a southern oil tycoon, raised in the prestigious salons of Europe. Rebekah charms, Klaus beguiles and Elijah—Elijah is sober, remote, the dutiful elder son, though he is charming on occasion, a quiet tranquillity capable of drawing smiles and virtues from even the most solemn of matrons, and the most prudish of maidens.

In short, they lie.

Klaus has made an art of lies, you see. He is the master of the three of them—he is the one who plans, who thinks, who schemes. Elijah does. Elijah acts. Elijah executes. Elijah is a pair of well-trained, weathered hands, while Rebekah, in her blind, golden loyalty and the naiveté, still, of an innocent, seeks only to temper the worst of Klaus's little cruelties. She is, more than anything else, his long dead heart, the last cog in the machine.

Now, Elijah stands, on a deserted street outside of the brothel Klaus and Rebekah frequents, on the outskirts of the city. He hears a laugh float down the street. A laugh like summer rain, like air bubbles in cold champagne. Elijah looks up, and sees, as if through different eyes, his siblings walking down the road, their hair glinting beneath the new gas lights.

She wears a shell pink dress, an airy confection of silk and lace, and Elijah, watches, silent, as Klaus leans over to whisper something into her ear, something that makes her shiver and smile.

"Elijah!" His brother sounds genuinely delighted to see him. "Have you taken leave of your paper work, then? Decided to become a man?"

"_Nik_," Rebekah admonishes. "_Don't_ be an arse."

Elijah straightens, and one of his clenched fists fall open, a single leaf of paper flying free.

His brother had always had an instinct for survival, a unique sense of danger. Elijah supposes it is his wolf side. Now Klaus's eyes flash gold, and his lips curl.

"Bekah, love." Klaus says. "Go inside, won't you. Find me a pretty little thing for dinner."

"Don't talk to me like that," Rebekah's mouth purses, a dainty gloved hand curling into a fist. "Say _please_, like a gentleman, for _God's_ sake—"

"_Please_ go inside." Klaus amends, voice even lower. "Bekah, go."

"No," Elijah says. "Rebekah, stay. You need to hear this too."

For a moment, Rebekah stands between them, train held in one hand, looking from one brother to another, until, finally, she drops it, sighs, and glides over to plant an apologetic kiss on Elijah's cheek, before whirling into the brothel in a haze of silk and perfume. Elijah remembers—Rebekah's first loyalty had always been to Klaus. She had belonged to him before she had belonged to anyone else.

"The hybrid," Elijah says finally, low and even, gesturing to the paper beneath Klaus's feet. "Killed the Original Witch.")

* * *

><p>Later, when Rebekah comes outside, her tongue thick with perfumed blood, she finds her brother crumpled against a lamp post, a red stain on his white shirt.<p>

"He's gone." Klaus says finally. "Elijah left us."

* * *

><p>They carry on. They carry on, as they always do; only now the two of them are well and truly alone.<p>

Their family falls away around them, existing only in coffins and whispers and shadows. And Rebekah becomes her brother's family twice over, thrice over, to fill the holes left behind by their brothers and the father who wants their heads. She smiles and grins and slaughters by his side, dips her hands in blood redder and thicker than the war she had fought almost a thousand years ago, becomes everything and more for her brother, just so she is enough.

(It weighs on her, heavy, as sure and real and solid as Atlas's burden, but still she says nothing. It wraps its cold hands around her long white throat, but still, she chokes back words.)

In 1922, they are in Chicago.

* * *

><p>The feeling she gets when she sees Stefan hits her like a physical thing. Knocks out the air in her lungs, makes her gasp, makes her stop.<p>

It's the light, she tells herself, as he poises himself on the bannister, grins at Gloria, grins at Gloria the same way Nik used to grin at her, almost a thousand years ago. It is the same, the same playful quirk of mouth, the same way how his sharp white teeth shine against his bottom lip, how the line of his lips are not swathed in shadows, how, for a split second, he seems incredibly young, this spitting image of Nik, this exact copy, better than her knight, better than any knight—

His eyes are not dead. That is the thing.

The boy turns his head, and the illusion shatters, like glass.

_Smile again,_ she urges silently. _Smile, smile._

* * *

><p>Rebekah falls again, harder than she had before, for the same playful cruelty, the same quirk of mouth, the same way he whispers her name as though he is praying. It is only now that she realizes she has not heard her name murmured that way in over five hundred years.<p>

She whispers to him what she had never whispered to her brother, wraps her legs taut around him in the dark of night, and says_, I love you._

(On some nights she lies next to Stefan, in the crook of his arm, watches his chest rise and fall in this imitation of life and she presses her lips very lightly to his skin, thinks there must be something desperately wrong with her.

She has begun to wonder. Has begun to wonder about this whole thing, this whole enterprise, about her brother, about herself. Thinks there must be something wrong with her that when she looks on this man—this _boy_—in her bed, all she sees is her brother, all she sees is gold. She has begun to wonder lately, about this, about her family, has begun to wonder if she can ever love whom she chooses, if she can ever love outside the family.

This body is a fortress. This family is a cage.)

Stefan is a boy. He lights up her existence like so much unfiltered light, drinks and kills and laughs while he does it, shines with something that can almost be mistaken for gold. She looks at him, and thinks—_I can make him better._ She looks at him, and thinks—_just a little work._

For the first time in her life, there is another path.

* * *

><p>"A king," he tells Klaus now. "You can be a king."<p>

(Klaus becoming a king does not make her a queen. She has nine hundred years' worth of experience to know this. She knows, in royalty, which issues of one's own body counts. Knows that a sister is nothing, compared to one's own children.

"You can leave him," Stefan had said once, with that grin. "Craft your own kingdom.")

All it takes is a few words, a few well-placed thoughts, and this house of cards all comes tumbling down. Stefan looks them in the eyes, whispers a few well-chosen litanies, and tears it all apart. It is a different kind of compulsion, but it works, all the same.

* * *

><p>"Then choose." He says. "Him or me."<p>

She closes her eyes. Makes the first choice in her life.

_And what will you do, dear brother, when my loyalties do not prove absolute?_

* * *

><p><strong>ACT V : GOTTERDAMMERUNG<strong>

(He has loved her for a thousand years, and he will love her for a thousand more, even if she wears a different face.)

* * *

><p>Nik leans over the dying girl, the dying girl with hair as gold as his own, and eyes wide and innocent still, and says—<p>

"You can have a thousand more birthdays. All you have to do is ask."

This time he will let her choose. This time he will do it right. In fifty years he will look at her, and she will be crafted entirely out of gold, entirely out of him.

This time she will not leave. This time she will not betray him. This time he will be a choice.

A voice, the voice of a dead girl with hair like the light of the sun whispers in that single, solitary, elevated moment—_Why are you doing this?_

But that is not the question. The question is _why are you leaving me? _The sentiment is, _I promised you forever._

The dead girl asks, _have I not loved you enough?_

The golden child in his arms bites into his skin, digs her teeth in deep and hard, and drinks, and Klaus thinks, sneers, _the love of a sister._

* * *

><p>(This is not a lie:<p>

"I miss you." She says.

When he replies, "I'll be home soon," she almost hesitates. Almost. She almost tells him everything, almost lets the words spill from her mouth, almost screams, _run, run_, but she doesn't, because if it's one thing he has taught her, he has taught her how to hate, how to let her heart be consumed with fire and light and a hate so dark and deep it is a physical thing—

So she doesn't. She says nothing. She makes her choice.)

* * *

><p>There is a story about a girl and a wolf and a grandmother, swallowed whole.<p>

The girl goes into the forest, they say, and a wolf lurks around the corner, dark and looming with blood on his teeth, tells her to pick some flowers, tells her to linger, and like a fool, the girl listens.

The wolf swallows her grandmother whole, swallows her but leaves a lump of meat behind, baked into a pie, and gets into bed, masked in a cap and a smile and his claws beneath the covers, voice full of endearments, and when the wolf asks the girl to taste the pie—_just a bite, dear, just a bite_—the girl does, and swallows, and holds within her a part of her grandmother's murder, a part of the wolf.

When she gets in bed with the wolf, naïve and innocent and _stupid_, he consumes her whole too.

* * *

><p>This is what they don't tell you:<p>

There is no huntsman to cut him open and set her free.


End file.
